Happy Hour in Hell

six: broken

I KEPT VERY still. A door opened somewhere nearby, and the thing raised its head. The small movement made the blade glint with reflected streetlight, its point only a thin width of skin from my eye and the brain behind it. The door closed again, and the street was silent. I cursed myself for having parked in a residential neighborhood instead of the busier street in front of my building, but I’d thought I was being careful. How had the little bastard spotted me in an unfamiliar car?

“Feather. Tell it.”

“What feather?”

The tip of the knife, or whatever it was, pushed down until I felt it pierce the first layer of flesh. I sucked in a breath. “It say question. You say answer.”

“I don’t have it with me.” Which was mostly a lie—I wouldn’t leave a crucial object like that sitting around unprotected—but not completely. The feather was in my jacket pocket, as it always was, but since my buddy Sam had used special angelic powers to hide it there, even I couldn’t reach it. See, it wasn’t just in the pocket, it was in a version of the pocket that had existed several weeks earlier. Yeah, it’s weird, but all you need to remember is: Feather in jacket pocket but not within reach by any normal methods. “The feather’s hidden far away,” I told the withered horror-monkey on my chest. “I have to get it.”

Smyler giggled. It was all I could do not to throw up. Knowing something that should have been dead was perched on top of me was one thing; hearing that papery chuckle again was another altogether. God in His Heaven, I’d seen this thing burn!

“Go? You not go. You tell. Then it find.”

It. Smyler called himself “it.”

“Why would I tell you the truth? You’ll just kill me anyway.”

Again the whispery laugh. “Because it see your friends. It see who you like. It very smart.”

I wanted to believe that he meant he would just do plain old physical harm to Monica and Clarence and the rest, as he’d done to Walter Sanders. Then again, Walter still hadn’t come back. This thing on top of me apparently couldn’t be killed—was it possible he also knew how to prevent the rest of us from coming back to life? Not to mention that if he was looking for the feather, he must be working for Eligor, and only the Highest and his closest servants could say what a Duke of Hell might be able to accomplish. I couldn’t take that risk.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell if you promise not to hurt anyone else . . .” And as I said it I lifted my left hand in surrender—or at least I wanted it to look that way, because I had a lead cosh zipped into the other sleeve of my jacket. There was no way I would have time to get it out, but during the instant his hidden eyes turned toward my left hand, I swung my other arm up as hard as I could and clubbed Smyler on the side of the skull with the hidden piece of metal.

I’d hoped to smash his head in, or at least knock him cold, but I wasn’t that lucky. What I did manage was to snap his head sideways and give myself a moment to kick my way free. Then he was back on me, and we were rolling on the ground. The nasty little fucker still had that long blade, which he was doing his best to stick between my ribs. I managed to get my right arm up and took part of the blow on the hidden cosh, but it was a stab, not a slice, so it bounced off the metal and went all the way through the sleeve of my jacket and raked my belly. It burned like someone had tried to tattoo me with a soldering gun; it was all I could do to roll away and dig in my pocket before the thing came after me again. I couldn’t get my gun out in time, so I shot through the pocket, three slugs right into Smyler’s middle as he lunged at me, bang-bang-bang. If I hadn’t been paying more attention to my new ride than my own safety, those slugs would have been silver, but Orban’s new rounds were still sitting in my glove compartment, and I was still pushing plain old copper-jacketed hollow-points. Still, Smyler had a physical body, so I knew they would at least knock him down if not completely eviscerate him.

Guess what? Wrong again. The little bastard almost went to his knees, which at least gave me time to roll clear, but the three rounds I put in him didn’t do much more than make him stagger. I finally got the gun all the way out of my pocket and tried to put one right in the middle of his hood, but it was like trying to throw tennis balls at a startled cat. He zigzagged as I pulled the trigger, and I don’t think I even came close, then he was on me again. I clubbed at him with the gun barrel as that long blade slid past my chest and under my arm, slicing me again, and I realized two things at the same time: The first was that he was only trying to disable me, for now, not kill me—he still wanted to know where the feather was. But if this was Smyler holding back, I was in serious trouble, because he was fast as anything I’d ever faced. My other realization was that the only advantage I had was a little bit of size and the unusual length of his blade, which meant he had to swing his arm way back to be able to drive it home. As the momentum of his next attack brought him toward me, I dodged the thrust, lowered my head so I could smash the top of my skull into his face, then wrapped my arms around him and drove forward.

I didn’t do as well at avoiding the thrust as I’d hoped. His blade went through my coat again and took a big chunk of flesh out of my arm, which hurt even more than you’re thinking it did. I was bleeding badly now from several wounds and was going to be in a world of pain if I survived, but I was running on pure adrenaline and could only hold on and try to carry him down to the hard pavement.

Smyler seemed to have limbs everywhere. He wrapped his legs around me and squeezed my ribs until I felt one crack, but I had to ignore the pain, because I knew if I let go of one of his arms he was going to poke that nasty long knife thing into the back of my neck and then drag my paralyzed body away somewhere to ask his questions at leisure.

He wiggled his no-knife arm out of my grip and wrapped it around my skull, then squeezed until I thought the blood was going to fountain out of the top of my head. I could hear sirens, and I prayed they were getting louder, but it was hard to tell because my brain was full of thunder and red light. I’d lost my pistol somewhere on the ground but still had the cosh in the forearm of my coat, so I started smashing it against his skinny back as hard as I could, over and over, praying that I could crush one of his vertebrae or at least rupture a kidney.

He laughed. The horrible, pinched face was right beside mine, and if I hadn’t been fighting for my very life the stink alone would have made me throw up. As it was, my eyes stung, and not just from sweat. I could feel the sinewy strength in his slender neck and that horrid, jutting jaw trying to close on my ear, my cheek, anything it could tear at, and all I could do was try to keep my head stretched as far away as possible while I crashed the metal bar against his spine.

“It like dancing!” Smyler whispered. “Oh, yes. It dance to glory!”

But now the sirens were too loud to ignore. At least one police car was coming down the street toward us fast, lights glaring and jouncing as the cruiser bounced over speed bumps. I felt my attacker go slack for just a moment, distracted, and I risked loosening my right-arm grip just long enough to swing my weighted sleeve into the back of his skull as hard as I could. I’m stronger than most normal people, and although the hoodie he was wearing muffled the blow a little it would certainly have knocked any ordinary assailant cold if not DOA. My attacker just shook his horrid head as though his ears had popped on an afternoon drive in the mountains, then shoved my skull back against the ground with a nasty, cold hand. I braced for steel in my guts.

“See you, Bobby Bad Angel,” Smyler whispered. “Soon!” Then he sprang up and was gone, over somebody’s garden hedge and away into the darkness. As I struggled and failed to sit up, I could see the lights of a half dozen open doors, and people standing at their windows looking out. Then the spot from the police cruiser fell on me, filling the world with painful white light, and that was the last thing I remembered.